Last night, the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS, the primary higher educational institution of the Conservative Movement) hosted a screening and panel on Inglourious Basterds. ( To catch up on how the candler blog feels about the film, you can check Sunrise Tippeconnie’s essay, Once Upon a Time in Violence Occupied Cinema, which was written for the film’s theatrical release.) Though an appearance by Quentin Tarantino was promised, the auteur was a no show claiming a sore throat (he gets the benefit of the doubt from me). Luckily, the producer of the film, Lawrence Bender, one of QT’s hebraic guides on the project, was in attendance to discuss the topic of “Jewish Persecution and the Fantasy of Revenge” alongside Dr. Amy Kalmanofsky, a bible and horror film scholar, and Rabbi Jack Moline, a pulpit Rabbi in Virginia whose Kol Nidre sermon about Inglourious Basterds sparked the institution’s interest in hosting such an event. Also, leading the panel was the school’s Chancellor, Arnold M. Eisen. Phew, now you have all the details, so how was it?
This was my third public screening of the film, though the first one on video. I have to say, if you missed this movie on film, you pretty much missed it. But that’s neither here nor there. This was an academic event so I gave some leeway on projected quality, though I will say I’ve seen much worse in other college auditoriums. Unsurprisingly, watching the film in a room full of mostly Jews, mind you months after the film had been unleashed on the masses, was barely different from watching the film in a room full of gentiles. Duh. A great fry cook once said “peoples is peoples”, of course, these are the chosen people watching their greatest enemies slaughtered on screen with great flair. There must be something different. Read on…
In my bloggy world I like keep up a certain level of decorum. Throwing in three-plus syllable words I find in my thesaurus, needlessly sticking to the New York Times style guide, and always listing at least three things if ever I need to describe an idea are all tactics I use to keep readers taking me seriously. However, every once in awhile it is necessary to shed such formalities and let bare a more persoanl reaction. Ruminating on Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s A Town Called Panic has presented just such a time. I must speak honestly with you, and decorum just might not hold up for a film as silly as this.
Up in the Air, director Jason Reitman’s third feature film, is a moving coming-of-middle-age piece that is a beat for beat redux of the director’s Thank You for Smoking. This film would feel stale if it weren’t so damn refreshing. Searing wit and heart-rending reveals are just two reasons to see this film. George Clooney is another, and in a big way.
Wes Anderson’s first film adaptation, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on Roald Dahl’s book of the same name, may be the director’s most fully realized piece to date. Witty, thoughtful and sharp as a tack, this little film is going to astonish audiences of all ages, and not for the usual reasons we say an animated film will impress. Written with gifted family dramatist Noah Baumbach, the film is about the growing pains we all experience at the various stages of life. It’s also about sentient rodents going to war with big business.
Chris Weitz, who has come a long way since co-directing American Pie with brother Paul, seems to have approached the second film in the newly dubbed “Twilight Saga” with the same utter disregard for proactive development as his predecessor, Catherine Hardwicke. New Moon is every ounce as boring as the first Twilight film, relying even more on the deep pockets and low expectations of tweenage girls. However, if two promising American directors (Hardwicke and Weitz) approached the same material and turned up dreck in both cases, maybe there is something more at work here. Maybe the material just sucks.
Precious. Intimate. Immediate. Privileged. These are the ways we can describe the various moments that occur in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. These terms, which any frosh film student should recognize, are generally associated with documentary cinema. They have become applicable here, however, because Mr. Jonze rightly decided to let the pomp and circumstance that comes with any major studio children’s film fall away, focusing this film on the rambunctious perspective of a child in flux.
I had never heard of Serge Bromberg before I went to the New York Film Festival’s screening of his. I thought I was going to see a restoration of a long lost film when I sat down to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno at this year’s New York Film Festival. However, once Serge Bromberg, the filmmaker behind this curious concoction, took the stage to begin introduce the film, I learned that it was something else entirely. Part documentary and part re-enactment, the film is an attempt to understand Clouzot’s most ambitious failure, a film that would have been called Inferno. and cinematic excavator who spent countless hours spelunking the depths of notes, dailies and interviews with every living person connected to the woebegone film, there simply wasn’t enough to resurrect Clouzot’s most ambitious failure. Luckily, he recognized that the story of Inferno could still be told even without all the elements of the original. 
Middle Eastern politics are as tenuous as ever. While filmmakers, artists, politicos and celebrities became entrenched in a controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature films from Tel Aviv this year, a very interesting thing happened halfway around the world. As voices pointed towards our neighbors to the north expressed beliefs for or against Israeli cinema, the jury at the Venice Film Festival gave their top honor, the Golden Lion, to Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon, a film which chronicles the 1982 Lebanon War from the vantage point of a tank gunner. We can learn a lot from not only a film like this, but the story that surrounds it given the timing of its release.